Friday, 29 July 2016

Review Exposure The Musical

For
a musical about a photographer, Exposure iscuriously uninterested in photography. There's
a hint of something here and there but it's never - please pardon the old-style
film pun - fully developed.

The strapline is "Life Through The
Lens" and we're first presented to embryo photographer Jimmy whenhe's -well - an embryo.in an ultrasound image. A projected photo ofthe baby in the womb,
a photographic process not entirely without risk and pain itself, towers over the stage.

Nevertheless
the backers of this new musical have taken the risk and may still feel the pain
because this kind of insight and coherence is never followed through in
Exposure.

The
set design by Timothy Bird clicks open like a camera shutter onto an African
landscape. It's a clever enough concept but gets entirely lost in the random
scenes and grab bag of styles, stories and clichés which follow.

Jimmy's
photojournalist Dad (Kurt Kansley) is in a drought-stricken African country
where an aid worker (Jahrel Thomas) pleads with him to take photos to tell the
world of a starving people's plight with hoardes crowded into refugee camps.

But
the songs have only the frailest connection to photography and any development
of the story. We're always willing to give new writing latitude. But a musical
progressing from Africa to a projection of a foetus in a womb with the buff
topless Jimmy (David Albury)emerging
singing from the shadows after his father's death, part beautified Frankenstein, part Chippendale (wait a moment - we haven't reached it yet!) with the memorable lyric "A
womb with a view"? (EM Forster and Noel Coward must
be groaning at the well-worn pun, as well as turning in their graves.)

And
so it goes on. It's an obviously fine cast, directed by Phil Willmott, who give their all and in grappling
with the unwieldy material rise as far as they can above it all.

To try and sum up the story - Jimmy is
determined from his schooldays to become a photographer while his mate blonde
Janet (I'd Do Anything's Niamh Perry) has designs to become a vocal superstar, but ominously
chooses the name "Pandora's Box" for her combo. Cue a lively
schoolyard routine (choreography Lindon Barr) which might fit well into a
youth musical.

Roll
on the years, and Jimmy and Pandora are now all growed up pursuing their
respective careers but bound to "fixer to the stars" Miles Mason
(Michael Greco) who locks Jimmy and Pandora into draconian contracts and turns out to be the devil in disguise. One of
the contractual stipulations seems to be that Jimmy should ride off into the
twilight zone and photograph the Seven Deadly Sins.

Cue
a totally off-the-wall underground Faustian parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. That's underground as in the
London Tube with station puns ranging from Anger Lane to Lusting Bec. Plus a range
of influences from Cats to Roald Dahl. And there's Jimmy's traffic accident, on
the motorbike gifted to him by Miles after receipt of his soul, with a hospital
scene like a cross between All That Jazzand
Angels in America.

Oh and pregnant Pandora takes an overdose while her elderly sugar
daddy is on the phone arranging for her to have an abortion while Jimmy has a
love interest in a homeless Irish lass, Tara (Emmerdale regular Natalie Anderson), who sells angels made out of Coke tins
on Jermyn Street..

Apparently
the legacy of the never-mentioned archive left by Jimmy's late Dad isn't enough to sustain his son
and pay the bills.Jimmy's life and exploitation by Miles Mason is played out with classic images from the Getty
archive flashed before our eyes, but there's no valid exploration of the
photographer's trade.

The
superficial clunky clichés only serve to highlight the curiously dated view of photography where the paparazzi are still viewed as
all-powerful withno competition from
amateurs with mobile phones.

Sure it is artistically fine to have the father
dressed like anold style war
photographer of the Frank Capa/Don McCullin mode.

However when the costuming
(designer Carla Goodman) and make up have a far more interesting narrative than the
book, it's a musical with the wrong zoom lens. So it's a TLT rare red/amber
light, red for the musical and amber for the cast and musicians who do their
best with a piece which should have stayed in the darkroom

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About Me

Mere colour-coded opinions here & on Twitter @TLTreviews
Follow Theatregoer's Highway Code - red for 'stay at home'; amber for 'may cater for some tastes'; and green for 'go! go! go!'; Usually all reviews are posted the day after our theatre trip! Alongside TLT and her little hatchback, aka Alice Josephs, journalists Francis Beckett http://www.francisbeckett.co.uk/, Peter Barker and Tim Gopsill also take the steering wheel at times as esteemed guest reviewers! If you feel the need to make me take my eyes off the blog while I'm driving, email me on trafficlightblog@yahoo.co.uk ...